Introduction
As the new
millennium approaches, the crucial need of the human race is to find a unifying vision of
the nature of man and society. For the past century humanity's response to this impulse
has driven a succession of ideological upheavals that have convulsed our world and that
appear now to have exhausted themselves. The passion invested in the struggle, despite its
disheartening results, testifies to the depth of the need. For, without a common
conviction about the course and direction of human history, it is inconceivable that
foundations can be laid for a global society to which the mass of humankind can commit
themselves.
Such a vision unfolds in the writings of
Bahá’u’lláh, the nineteenth century prophetic figure whose growing influence
is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history. Born in
Persia, November 12, 1817, Bahá’u’lláh1 began at age 27 an undertaking
that has gradually captured the imagination and loyalty of several million people from
virtually every race, culture, class, and nation on earth. The phenomenon is one that has
no reference points in the contemporary world, but is associated rather with climactic
changes of direction in the collective past of the human race. For Bahá’u’lláh
claimed to be no less than the Messenger of God to the age of human maturity, the Bearer
of a Divine Revelation that fulfills the promises made in earlier religions, and that will
generate the spiritual nerves and sinews for the unification of the peoples of the world.
If they were to do nothing else, the effects
which Bahá’u’lláh's life and writings have already had should command the
earnest attention of anyone who believes that human nature is fundamentally spiritual and
that the coming organization of our planet must be informed by this aspect of reality. The
documentation lies open to general scrutiny. For the first time in history humanity has
available a detailed and verifiable record of the birth of an independent religious system
and of the life of its Founder. Equally accessible is the record of the
response that the new faith has evoked, through the emergence of a global community which
can already justly claim to represent a microcosm of the human race.2
During the earlier decades of this century,
this development was relatively obscure. Bahá’u’lláh's writings forbid the
aggressive proselytism through which many religious messages have been widely promulgated.
Further, the priority which the Bahá’í community gave to the establishment of
groups at the local level throughout the entire planet militated against the early
emergence of large concentrations of adherents in any one country or the mobilization of
resources required for large-scale programs of public information. Arnold
Toynbee, intrigued by phenomena that might represent the emergence of a new universal
religion, noted in the 1950s that the Bahá’í Faith was then about as familiar to
the average educated Westerner as Christianity had been to the corresponding class in the
Roman empire during the second century A.D.3
In more recent years, as the Bahá’í
community's numbers have rapidly increased in many countries, the situation has changed
dramatically. There is now virtually no area in the world where the pattern of life taught
by Bahá’u’lláh is not taking root. The respect which the community's social
and economic development projects are beginning to win in governmental, academic, and
United Nations circles further reinforces the argument for a detached and serious
examination of the impulse behind a process of social transformation that is, in critical
respects, unique in our world.
No uncertainty surrounds the nature of the
generating impulse. Bahá’u’lláh's writings cover an enormous range of subjects
from social issues such as racial integration, the equality of the sexes, and disarmament,
to those questions that affect the innermost life of the human soul. The original texts,
many of them in His own hand, the others dictated and affirmed by their author, have been
meticulously preserved. For several decades, a systematic program of translation and
publication has made selections from Bahá’u’lláh's writings accessible to
people everywhere, in over eight hundred languages.
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Bahá'u'lláh forbids:
Bahá'u'lláh
